The armor changes are a nerf if your bonus armor is >= 45% of your total armor, which a top of the line naxx druid was. If you are in full Wrath blues then it should be a buff, however if you are still using some TBC tier/PVP gear then it may very well be a nerf for you as well.

Not as far as I can see; unless I have made a mistake in counting the armour on the gear you list, you appear to have a total of 3242 base armour and 2107 bonus armour on the items(Flowing is base 140, bonus 364 as far as I know), which means that currently the armour on the items should be providing (3242+2107)*1.1*4.7 = 27650 armour, while they would provide (3242*1.1*1.66*4.7)+2107 = 29930 armour post-patch for a gain of 2280 armour.

(And if you choose to dump the in favour of at that point, you'd lose 354 armour and 26 defense rating and gain 4 str, 36 sta, 49 dodge rating, and 21 expertise - a favourable tradeoff from a tanking perspective)

If you replace the with the , that would give you 2657 bonus armour instead of 2107, for 30497 armour now and 30480 armour post-patch for a loss of 17 armour.

If you do that and throw in the for another 385 bonus armour we get 32487 pre-patch and 30865 post-patch for a loss of 1622 armour.

What is the difference in our calculations that gives you so significantly different results from mine and allows you to construct scenarios where you can lose 2-3k armour without having anything from Naxxramas? If there's an error in my calculations, I'd dearly love to know it - which base and bonus values have you been using when you got that result?

Absent such an error, everything I've seen suggests that those with under approximately 30k armour from armour sources at the moment are unlikely to feel it as a nerf, and that it is entirely possible to have armour items in all relevant slots without losing the 2-3k armour you wrote about first unless you are pretty close to best in slot equipped, and that, as such, it is very likely that there'll be considerably more "normal bears" that feel it is a buff than there'll be who feel it is a nerf.

I really hope this is just rank 1 and it somehow scales to not completely suck. Lets see, two Swipe (Cats) on a full energy bar, or swap to Bear form for unlimited 2 target Mangle + unlimited all target Swipe...

It also builds no combo points, so the cost of 50 energy is absolutely absurd.

It's 45 energy, since it's affected by ferocity. Taking into account the extra 120 energy per minute from tiger's fury, and the extra 3.5 cat swipes a minute from OOC, that works out to 19.5 swipes a minute by my calculations, or roughly 2 bear swipes for every cat swipe.

You have to consider that cat swipe will be doing significantly more damage than double the damage bear swipe does. Cats have more AP than bears, cat swipe will do 260% weapon damage, you can have savage roar up, you can use tiger's fury, cat specced druids get extra crit damage. Because of this I think cat swipe will be a better option than bear swipe. I figure it to do a bit over 50% more DPS than bear swipe for my gear as a tank specced druid, although some of that is won back by bear maul (if rage is available) vs cat auto attack. Not incredibly blow it out of the water better like some may have hoped for, but still better.

It's 45 energy, since it's affected by ferocity. Taking into account the extra 120 energy per minute from tiger's fury, and the extra 3.5 cat swipes a minute from OOC, that works out to 19.5 swipes a minute by my calculations, or roughly 2 bear swipes for every cat swipe.

You have to consider that cat swipe will be doing significantly more damage than double the damage bear swipe does. Cats have more AP than bears, cat swipe will do 260% weapon damage, you can have savage roar up, you can use tiger's fury, cat specced druids get extra crit damage. Because of this I think cat swipe will be a better option than bear swipe. I figure it to do a bit over 50% more DPS than bear swipe for my gear as a tank specced druid, although some of that is won back by bear maul (if rage is available) vs cat auto attack. Not incredibly blow it out of the water better like some may have hoped for, but still better.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the game tracks energy regeneration even when not in cat form, yes? In that case, feral AoE will resemble the way a lot of classes do dps -- you have skills you want to spam, but you can't because they have cooldowns, so you fall back on your secondary skills. For cats they will swipe (cat) twice (maybe more if you pop tiger's fury/berserk), shift to bear and swipe (bear)/maul (mangle if berserking?), and shift back to cat when they get enough energy to swipe (cat) again. Seems like a reasonable buff to feral AoE if swipe (cat) significantly outdamages swipe (bear), and it makes it less boring to boot.

The armor change does seem like a buff over all. In my feral gear (offspec feral, so a few badge pieces and a few items that i'we got from 25naxx that nobody else needed combined with heroic/rep gear) i have 37k armor at the moment. According to my math i'd have around 35k after the patch, which in itself currently is a slight decrease. The change will however allow me to switch what then becomes negligible amounts of armor (offering of sacrifice being the most obvious one) to pieces that give a lot more avoidance or stamina.

I hadn't considered the cat/bear shifting idea. It might work, although the mana cost makes it unsustainable for long I suspect.

As far as the armor changes go, I really can't see how people see it as a nerf. It gives us a heck of a lot more gear options, and whatever minor decrease people see in armor is made up for by the extra avoidance and stam you can stack in those slots now. I mean really, people complaining about losing 400 armor or something if you have otherwise crappy high armor stuff in every slot? That's less than 1% extra physical mitigation. You'll easily pick up a couple of percent dodge and a couple of thousand HP if you replace those items. Not a difficult tradeoff to make.

I hadn't considered the cat/bear shifting idea. It might work, although the mana cost makes it unsustainable for long I suspect.

Sure it's not sustainable, but AoE is not very sustainable for most classes. Typically in modern raid encounters AoE demands are bursty, and dps classes get long breaks to recover their resources/cooldowns. On trash it doesn't matter much -- and at any rate iLotP, a talent which many people fit into their raid specs, should help. Primal tenacity's new mana cost reduction would be nice for this as well, but the overall talent seems better for PvP, and is probably too marginal to fit into feral PvE specs which are chronically short on points these days.

As I recall unless you have iLotP you get no way to mana regen at all in forms now, so it's pretty much required if you want to do the shift between the two idea for bursts on a long fight. I agree that taking primal tenacity is purely for PvP.

However you could also argue that if you're talking about doing short bursts, then just saving 100 energy and using tiger's fury during that burst is probably plenty. That should allow you to get 5 cat swipes off in 6.5 seconds. By the time you're done sitting in bear for 10 seconds to regen 100 energy after that is anything much going to even be alive?

about first unless you are pretty close to best in slot equipped, and that, as such, it is very likely that there'll be considerably more "normal bears" that feel it is a buff than there'll be who feel it is a nerf.

Well, as I wrote, I never entered Naxx 10/25, only heroic 5man instances, and I am sitting on something like 34k armor unbuffed. I used RAWR to check the armor change and changed the cloak manually, so perhaps I made an error there. But I learned to trust RAWR, when it comes to numbers.

You can see my current heroic setup under The World of Warcraft Armory ... for me it will be a major armor nerf and I donÂ´t have Defenders Code. And please no comment about missing enchants, I have several problems with my time/priority management in WoW. ;-) But even with the above mentioned starting tank set I cannot imagine that this patch will be a buff ... and donÂ´t forget, in 2 or 3 month from now on, many bears will consider Naxx10 something like an enlarged UBRS / Karazhan: random groups running through in 3-4 hours. Which means the armor change will hit a lot of bears in some month from now on.

And to be honest: I regard my setup as a possible base setup for every bear who runs several heroic instances and who wants to tank Naxx and more and nothing "special", "time consuming" or even "top of the line".

As far as the armor changes go, I really can't see how people see it as a nerf. It gives us a heck of a lot more gear options, and whatever minor decrease people see in armor is made up for by the extra avoidance and stam you can stack in those slots now. I mean really, people complaining about losing 400 armor or something if you have otherwise crappy high armor stuff in every slot? That's less than 1% extra physical mitigation. You'll easily pick up a couple of percent dodge and a couple of thousand HP if you replace those items. Not a difficult tradeoff to make.

Because it is a nerf. It's a good thing in the long term because it doesn't make us as reliant on specific drops, but you cannot possibly say this is not a nerf. We're not "gaining" anything back, and that 1% physical migitation you're talking about is infact a 4% damage taken increase, going from 27% of all physical damage taken * PotP reduction = 23.76% damage taken, instead of that I'll be taking 29% of all physical damage taken + PotP reduction = 25.52% damage taken, that's a 7% damage taken increase. You're out of your mind if you think I'll "get that back" by being able to use non-armor gear, because if that were the case we'd already be using that now.

Now again, this will work out in our favour in the long run just because of the RNG drop system, but don't try to sugarcoat it as a buff.

1) more stamina, but currently many bears are already the tanks with the most HP, and you give armor up
2) more dodge, but for that you give armor up
3) you can now roll on pieces with block/parry *eg*

If you change your rings/necks/weapons/trinkets from armor, you will loose an additional 1k to 3k points of armor, and gain some % dodge and 1k to 2k life.

I'd say the bear armor changes have been discussed about sufficiently. For some gearing levels it comes down to a slight nerf (arguably a justified one) while at others it will come to a slight buff even. Whether this is a nerf or a buff depends mostly on the availability of bonus armor items at that particular gearing level (and luck with getting those and the availability of options as well).

I agree we have an advantage going into naxx and we seem to gain more of an advantage the more geared up we become, the damage I am currently taking is a joke compared to the other similar geared tanks, mainly due to we did still need taking down a peg I'll still probably use my trinket for the use effect after the patch however, that and there isn't actually many other trinkets to go with.

Last I checked, across all gear levels mitigation * avoidance on druids was superior to mitigation * avoidance of other tank classes, on top of being smoother and having a larger health pool.

The mitigation issue really depends. Druids are by far the best hateful target, but on smaller, multiple hitting bosses or magical damaging bosses they're further behind. The differences between the tanking classes are fairly minor at this point though, with one exception - stamina on druids is somewhat absurd.

It's also a bit absurd that bears are so much better off pre-Naxx than other tanking classes.

I don't honestly think that this will help those issues all that much. The problem is that the two stats druids scale best with druids scale too well with.

The counterpoint to the fact that block is linear is that for anything hitting for over 10k (Enraged Maexxna, enraged faerlina, Sartharion with 3 stacks of Twilight Revenge - all pretty trivial in terms of numbers anyway, but there you have it) druid mitigation still came out better. For stuff slightly under, to about 7k a hit, blocked hits take the average damage per swing to below what a druid takes, at the expense of less-smooth damage-taken profiles. For anything under 4-5k a hit, block (especially prot paladin) wins out hands down.

Magic damage fights are a little harder to profile at the moment - the only two encounters available at the moment which would come to mind are Malygos at lower gear levels where an Arcane Breath and swing has a chance of 1-rounding, or Sarth+3, where you can take up to 30k breaths post-25% hp penalty aura. In both cases, a gigantic HP pool covers the situation. Death Knights hands down make the best magic mitigation tanks (as designed, despite 'tank equality') but the other three tanking classes are somewhat interchangable.

What my beef is, is that every time the three ridiculously scaling stats druids have (namely, Armor and Stam, pre-WotLK Agility) come under the spotlight, hordes of idiots come out of the woodwork crying about nerfs, without any empirical or at least theoretical data to support the claims. (No, gear lists and patch-induced armor nerfs aren't the focus of this - TTL vs other tanks, taking encounters into account is) This does -not- add anything to the thread or open up any avenues of discussion.

I've got Defenders Code, the Naxxramas +armor tanking staff and cloak, and Heroic DtK tanking ring. The patch will drop my armor by a cartload, but only because I managed to RNG all those drops. The bottom line, as has been mentioned in the thread, is relying on chance to get a specific number of drops is hardly good design.

I don't know about you guys complaining about sub-optimal rogue gear and +strength/defense jewelry, but I've had a lot of a better time so far in WotLK looking through gear lists and comparing items by slot to find optimum tanking gear, compared to... tier gear and badge loot and the occasional trash drop in TBC. The fact that its 'suboptimal' doesn't matter. Even pre-WotLK you could have designed tanking gear better than what was in-game, and... have druids scale through the roof.

The final outcome and how said gear stacks up vs other tanks, for the encounters in the game, is what matters. Opening up more itemization choices is nothing if not healthy for the game.